While exploring the world and the associated conservation issues I've been noting down my reflections and discoveries. Some posts are more organized while others are simple notes.

I generally focus on conservation issues effecting biodiversity, land use/abuse, research, and job opportunities that I have come across. Most of the opportunities come from the Opps page and you can click on the button below to take you there.

This is a Threatened Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) that researchers were fitting a telemetry transponder upon to be able to manage their recovery

​Why Save Endangered Species?For the last few years, I’ve been playing with the question: why should I care -here, in the United States-if a sparrow goes extinct in Sri Lanka (I just randomly choose a country distant to me but I also like the way a “sparrow in Sri Lanka” sounds- I don’t even know if they have sparrows)? I thought of this when working on building habitat for an endangered sparrow species in southern California. I was very dissatisfied with the answers I could think of: because all nature is connected and the loss of any species will tear apart the connections, that we don’t have the right to let species go extinct from our actions, and that humans will be directly affected by the loss of species. These answers are either subjective or far more nuanced, if not false universally. Biodiversity conservation and rare species conservation specifically is more challenging than other environmental efforts, like clean air and clean water efforts. However, there are great answers for biodiversity conservation and I’ve been collecting them over the years. While I don’t feel I have found or developed a solid, utilitarian (to humans), and universal answer, my notes below have put me closer.

I’ve been collecting these answers in my readings and have even inserted them in several presentations but I am inspired to collect them like this now because of the recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Dr. Pyron. In We Don’t Need to Save Endangered Species. Extinction is Part of Evolution., Dr. Pyron brings up great arguments about why endangered species do not need to be saved. I disagree with his conclusions and even his rationale but he does bring up great conservation issues in general. Without going into it too much, the one paradox inherent in conservation is that it is trying to save species that are by definition 4-dimensional genetic expressions (occurring both in space but also in the billions-of-years lineage that they are). Dr. Eisenberg speaks to this when she says we are working save the trajectories of species and habitats, not how we perceive them at some arbitrary place and time of our choosing. Instead of responding to Dr. Pyron’s argument directly right now (I might do so soon), I figured I would share all the reasons why I should care about a sparrow in Sri Lanka.

“Congress answered this question in the preamble to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, recognizing that endangered and threatened species of wildlife and plants "are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people."

Benefits of natural diversity

Contributions to medicine

Biodiversity and agriculture

Environmental monitors

Ecosystem services

Other economic values

Intangible values “

Ok, so here is my list. It is a list-in-process though and I will continue adding and editing it. In all this, I haven’t incorporated Kellert’s typology of attitudes or Gorke’s entire book The Death of Our Planet’s Species, which deals with both the biological and philosophical issues of biodiversity conservation. I will try to address these in the next iteration of this post.Why does saving an endangered species matter?​

Point of no return

Extinction is irreversible

Natural sciences

Ecological

Island Biogeography- at some point there is a non-linear tipping point and this is exemplified by islands but from a global perspective, every habitat is it’s own island to some degree

Ehlrich’s Rivet theory – there is a tipping point where too many rivets out of the airplane is too much

amendment: some rivets are big and more important, some small, and others are nodes what are more dependent on others

Ecosystem strength – we just don’t know the full impact of lost species because the results are skewed by the buffer of other species, lost in the complexity, or not recognizable for other reasons

An extension of Taleb’s Antifragile idea

Geology

Our ecosystem is only spaceship earth for the period of the Holocene and that is a very short time, we don’t know our home outside of the narrow parameters of our time-frame

Genetic

Unique nonreplicable material

Evolutionary:

“Today’s ecologically trivial species could be tomorrow’s keystone species” Kareiva and Levin

Human psychology

EO Wilson’s biophilia

David Quammen – monsters of god: we lose a major part of our psyche when we lose the real world components that helped to create our psyche.

As the most powerful and successful species, it is our duty to save non-human species

Stealing from future humans, from next generations that will not have them

Morality

A human value of them: we choose to allow them to flourish

Hume’s Naturalistic Fallacy: there is no ought from is, so it is our responsibility to create good “oughts”

Aesthetics

Truth in beauty

Subjective beauty

Poetic Naturalism

Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking

Biodiversity and species preservation are important enough to warrant talking

Speciesist/Object Oriented Ontology

A species has an innate right to exist and it is not within another species’ right to make it extinct

Information Theory

Harari: dataism – how are species relevant to data and information – similar to how modern westerners treat those they’ve displaced -how we treat animals now is how superhumans and the next evolution will treat us

Justice: Species are genetic information, information to defy evil (Roman (I think) – but then using Deutsch’s maxim: all evil is insufficient knowledge)

Other:

Ashley Dawson: species preservation is the only way to empower third world countries through their agency

Altruism: choosing to save non-human species demonstrates the best capacities of humanity (this might be me but with influences from Frans de Waal or others)